


Wolverines

by Christer_Bleu



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe, Non-Traditional Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Space Colonization, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-26
Updated: 2017-10-26
Packaged: 2019-01-23 14:44:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12509768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Christer_Bleu/pseuds/Christer_Bleu
Summary: Really there was only one drawback that had made me hesitant to sign onto theQueen’s Icon. Some dumbass had decided to name J23-61 Terra Nova and the name had made it into the charter. “Fuckin’ homeworld colonies.” I said looking at the bold block letters proudly displaying the words ‘Terra Nova’ at the top of the holoscreen, “No imagination in their names. If we’re makin’ somethin’ this beautiful it should’ve been named after a woman.” No one disagreed.





	Wolverines

**Author's Note:**

> Right before we jump into this for the like... I dunno five of you who are actually going to read this. I decided I was going to do some world building to coax my muse back. She packed up her stuff and moved out saying that our relationship had become emotionally abusive when I started neglecting her. 
> 
> The events herein occur long before the beginning of Forward Unto Dawn.

I woke up three days before my one hundred and eleventh birthday, tried to stand and promptly fell flat on my face earning a round of raucous laughter from every other person in the rehabilitation bay. Groaning I rolled over onto my back and stared dumbly at my legs, disbelief coloring my expression. In eighty years the technology still hadn’t advanced to the point where waking up from an ice nap didn’t turn you into a cat with tape stuck to its paws for the first week or so. But there was no use grumbling about it, we were Wolverines, it was what we had signed up to do even if nearly a century had passed and no one had found a way to nullify the effects of sleeping for years on end.

But I wasn’t being fair, gazing around the room was all the proof I needed that the technology had advanced lightyears beyond what it had been when I’d first signed my contract. Travelling at relativistic speeds had been enough when Tier Five Frontier Space had been a jaunty two or three hundred year distance from Earth if you were travelling in one of the Shuttle Orbiters from the 21st Century. The OV-105 Model had been updated and used regularly for trips to Mars or the Moon or the Asteroid Colonies when I’d been younger so the measure had stuck for the same reason that people on Earth still measured distances by how long it would take by train or air car.

Human expansion had known no bounds in space where resources were a matter of just getting to a place first and finding a way to move them reliably back to wherever you needed them. The home world may have been a cesspit with a near stagnant population at the best of time but life in space flourished and Frontier Space kept getting pushed further and further back. Relativistic Speeds weren’t enough anymore. There had been several thousand failed experiments before the Martian Archive was officially released to the public as existing and Phoenix Enterprises had constructed the first jump gate. 

From the best of my understanding the Jump Gates work by creating actual wormholes between two fixed points in space lined up together, but to get from one point to the next before the energy necessary to generate the damn things dissipated and crushed your ship into an oblivion science could only speculate at you had to be going fast. Real fast. Fast enough to pull 80 _g_ inside the mass effect field generated around the ship and even a gutter born rat on Earth can tell you that a human couldn’t survive 80 _g_. Not even spacers.

Then medical tech had come to the rescue, the same advancements that had been used to launch the first of the colonial seed ships to their impending demise had been reborn and manufactured on mass for use in space. At first it had been a toss up as to whether or not you could actually survive doctor’s putting you into a medicated coma, slowing your metabolism down to just about dead and throwing you in a zero tau pod. Anything could happen as relativistic speeds grew faster as the understanding of the mass effect fields grew. More than a few Wolverines woke up dead every time we made a jump back in the day.

Now everyone woke up, it just took a lot longer for their legs to get the memo and get with the program.

It was gratifying that I wasn’t the only one on the ground, three more men in the fifty meter long barracks were floundering around on the floor on the row my bunk was on. More elsewhere in the ten row arrangement of bunks. I laughed along with the other men for some of the same reasons, if the people at home down the gravity well could see their brave Wolverines now. The frontiersmen, the colony builders, the terraformers sprawled gracelessly on their asses waiting to get feeling back in their legs enough to walk more young men and women would flock to acquire a time deficit of centuries and become walking anachronisms.

In truth the time debt was a part of why we all signed up, we’re Wolverines and every day we lived was just another day in Paradise. Even if that day began on the floor waiting for the VI to kill the field that generated gravity and plunge us all into free fall. It wouldn’t be long now, there was one hell of a storm coming and everyone onboard the planet cracker had to get to the nearest safe room before space once again did it damnedest to kill everyone onboard. It was good at that.

Mercifully the VI killed the gravity and announced in a far too cheery voice that we all had, “Two hours before the ionic storm is within range, we will be recharging our emergency batteries and as such the _Queen’s Icon_ will be slowing to a halt. Please do not be alarmed and proceed to the nearest safe room. “

The VI, Rebecca, paused as nearly four hundred Wolverines pushed themselves into the air lazily heading in the direction of the bay doors to our bunk. Everyone one of the veterans chanting out loud with the VI as she continued, “Safe rooms are available on every deck of the _Queen’s Icon._ , the path to the safe room will be illuminated in green on the bulkhead in the hallway. Please proceed calmly.” 

We’d get an update every thirty minutes until the fifteen minute mark where she’d start chiming every minute until she counted down the last before the ship got bombarded. The nearest safe room to the living quarters of the Wolverines was the curival where we all clustered about our respective peer groups. Five years ago, my time, I would’ve been another screaming green horn looking at the readouts that the _Icon’s_ forward beacon was reporting back and worry endlessly about how much heat the ship was going to be taking. But that was then, and this is now.

Strictly speaking, the curival was the closest safe room for everyone in any of the living compartments and most of the labs onboard the planet cracker. A cylindrical space that ran within the core of the spine of the industrial carrier surrounded on all sides by the water tanks. The spine itself was constructed out of solid metal alloy sheets bolted together and chosen for the ability to block radiation as much as their strength. Much of the spine was protected by hard ran shielding, the engines and massive generators were affixed to one end as well as each of the nine tori spaced at regular intervals. 

_The Queen’s Icon_ , like her sisters, was less of a ship and more like a mobile colony with design and layout lifted from the Space Ark in the Kupier Belt. I glanced in the direction that would generally be regarded as down given that it was the direction of the engines and couldn’t resist as smile as the ten thousand man crew clustered into the massive hallway ten miles long and near five hundred meters across. Wolverines, every single one of us.

Politically speaking, _“Wolverines”_ was derogatory nomenclature based on a logic fallacy concerning an extinct terrestrial mammal native to North America that went something like “I’ve never seen a wolverine, I don’t know anyone who has ever seen a wolverine, so wolverines must not exist.” For the lion’s share of humanity the terraforming technicians were a complete mystery, people didn’t see terraforming technicians, people didn’t know anyone who had, and thus as a result terraforming technicians didn’t exist. Somehow inhabited planets that hit the sweet spot for garden worlds just became garden worlds magically with no human intervention required.

Absolute nonsense.

To be fair to them there were times that I considered that Wolverines themselves didn’t exist. There wasn’t really much to do in transit to a place like J23-61, another hellishly uncomfortable world of impossibly high temperatures and pressure suffering under the effects of its own greenhouse emissions like Venus had for millennia. Fortunately for J23-61 it was a completely treatable ailment and not a death sentence.

I found myself in a cluster of other Early Biosphere Technicians, which was just a fancy way of saying that we were the guys who planted bacteria and fungus everywhere. Some of them I knew, some of them I didn’t, but one of them had brought a portable holoscreen with them and linked it to their omni-tool. Instead of porn of sports two decades out of date or cartoons or equally out of date news the readout was showing the latest news from the guys on the ground at J23-61 and the cultures we’d most likely be embedding. Quickly I adopted the position of “free fall rest”, activating the magnet in my boots to stick feet first to the wall which became in my mind the new floor. In free fall the ground was wherever the hell you decided that it was, not the orientation of the door or hallway you were in.

Talk dissolved into smaller and smaller groups of individuals talking shop, one of which was a green horn just off to my left marveling at the size of the _Queen’s Icon_. I grunted in agreement, she was a magnificent ship although only about a fourth of her was labs and living space. The bulk of her mind bogglingly large cargo space allotment was reserved exclusively for the equipment needed to begin Stage 3 Terraformation.

Terraformation was a long process that begun on J23-61 with moving a mirror the size of Earth’s moon into position between J23-61 and it’s local star casting the world into perpetual night as the atmosphere plants were constructed. The atmosphere plants served two purposes, the first was the neutralization of the hostile atmosphere by literally setting it on fire and letting it boil itself away, and the second by replacing the gasses that had been burned away with those suitable for human habitation. Stage 2 Terraformation had begun with a bombardment of boloids with a high water ice content to both create an ocean and provide raw material for the atmosphere plant to work with. Once the atmosphere was breathable but cold enough that it was like breathing chilled vodka carefully modified archaebacteria was released into the “wild” to kill over whatever microbiome remaining that had survived an atmosphere that was literally napalm for anywhere between ten to twenty years.

Stage 3 Terraformation was where the Wolverines really got involved and the heavy lifting began, a labor intensive process of making sure that the archaebacteria had succeeded in its job or at the very least met a very specific margin of success. If the scientists who oversaw Stage 2 couldn’t kill off enough of what remained it was my job to seed a very nasty fungus. At some point someone had decided that if the fungus could kill all the plants, bacteria, and just about everything else on a failed continent it could kill just about everything. Fungus land had eventually become a success after many years of trial, error, and extreme quarantines culminating finally in just reseeding the world to suit the fungus. And boy had the boys in the CRISPR labs pulled through.

I’d had the pleasure of unleashing the nightmare fungus once, it was the nuclear option of terraformation, a biological weapon that killed just about everything that hadn’t been made specifically to form a symbiotic relationship with it. The world, Yennifer, had turned out to be a literal garden of Eden despite the world spanning fungi beneath the colonists’ feet. They’d used coral to grow their cities to fit the aesthetic.

The real work of Stage 3 was the construction of a viable biosphere and creating first a garden world. someone had already done the design on a much smaller scale, the _Icon_ housing embryonic plants, animals, and bacterial cultures in two sets: one for an effectively neutralized world and one for the scub fungus. When the bacterial cultures were ready to go the mirror would be angled so that some light from the local star would reach the world and begun warming it. From there the bacteria would run rampant until soil was created, once we had soil we’d seed the grasses and scrub bushes, then release the insects and seed flowers. After flower would come the trees, massive sequoia analogues that would grow to tower hundreds of feet in the air and be planted onboard years before it was time that they were planted on the ground.

Once we had trees my job was done as the animals were released, general analogues that would find a niche and adapt to it becoming wolves and song birds and deer and stag depending on where they were and what niche they had chosen to exploit. The exact how if it I wasn’t exactly sure, something to do with epigenetics. Spacers loved epigenetics.

After that Stage 3 was just about done, the Stage 4 boys would sweep in and see to the animals in the ocean larger than the salmon analogue which would have time to form a decent food web. Then we’d all go back on ice for another two decades to reach the hub and be out again still asleep.

For some, becoming a Wolverine was in impossible prospect, people with families to consider and lives that must be left behind. For some the thought of becoming a Wolverine was tantamount to insanity, abandoning everything to sleep for centuries to create worlds you’d never live on. They believed that somehow we’d been tricked into the job, that once you were in you were in forever.

The truth was that most of the early colonists on the new worlds the Wolverines had engineered were Wolverines themselves, the passage they were made to pay to become colonists waved by their endeavors to create a world. The truth was that Wolverines never went acquired more than five years debt on the first few missions, send to survey closer worlds to make certain that the work had took, before signing a longer contract. Few didn’t sign longer contracts, twenty or thirty years our time at the longest, most of use didn’t really have families to go back to.

I’d talked to enough Wolverines to know that a lot of them were like me, people from the homeworld with no future, no legacy, and nothing to look forward to except maybe addiction to red sand and an early death stabbed in a gutter. For me at least, a world like J23-61 was something to look forward too, a legacy that would echo through time as long as there was a human alive to read the records of the Sol Consensus. J23-61 was a sign of hope! A sign of triumph! Something I could wake up and look forward to creating!

Really there was only one drawback that had made me hesitant to sign onto the _Queen’s Icon_. Some dumbass had decided to name J23-61 Terra Nova and the name had made it into the charter. “Fuckin’ homeworld colonies.” I said looking at the bold block letters proudly displaying the words ‘Terra Nova’ at the top of the holoscreen, “No imagination in their names. If we’re makin’ somethin’ this beautiful it should’ve been named after a woman.” No one disagreed.


End file.
